1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to using a Smart Client to interface with another application.
2. Description of the Related Art
Customer Relationship Management (“CRM”) is an integrated approach to identifying, acquiring and retaining customers. By enabling organizations to manage and coordinate customer interactions across multiple channels, departments, lines of business, and geographies, CRM helps organizations maximize the value of customer interactions and drive superior corporate performance.
Today's organizations must manage customer interactions across multiple communications channels—including the Web, call centers, field sales, dealers and partner networks. Many organizations also have multiple lines of business with many overlapping customers. The challenge is to make it easy for customers to do business with the organization any way they want—at any time, through any channel, in any language or currency—and to make customers feel that they are dealing with a single, unified organization that recognizes them at every touch point.
By streamlining processes and providing sales, marketing and service personnel with better, more complete customer information, CRM enables organizations to establish more profitable customer relationships and decreased operating costs. Sales organizations can shorten the sales cycle and increase key sales-performance metrics, such as revenue per sales representative, average order size and revenue per customer. Marketing organizations can increase campaign response rates and market-driven revenue while simultaneously decreasing lead generation and customer acquisition costs. Customer service organizations can increase service-agent productivity and customer retention while decreasing service costs, response times and request resolution times. Companies that create satisfied, loyal customers are more likely to have repeat business, lower customer acquisition costs and build stronger brand value, all of which translates into better performance.
To implement CRM approaches, organizations have made use of CRM software. For example, an organization might build a database (or other data structure) about its customers that describe relationships in sufficient detail so that management, sales people, service people and partners can directly access information, match customer needs with product plans and offerings, remind customers of service requirements, know what other products a customer had purchased, understand service histories for various customers and coordinate sales and marketing efforts. Thus, a CRM software system may include (but is not limited to) a data structure that stores contact information for customers, sales history, service history, sales leads information, various activities being performed on behalf of a customer, sales opportunities, and/or other data.
Although CRM software systems can provide substantial return on investment for an organization, not all organizations who have implemented a CRM system have been properly taking advantage of the CRM system. For example, many employees are not normally logged into a CRM system. When a particular sales lead is generated or other activity is planned or performed, it is not always convenience to go seek access to the CRM system to record the data. In some cases, the employees of an organization are not properly trained to use the CRM software system. Some employees may not know how to access the CRM system at all. Many CRM systems are custom solutions, which require a large amount of training of individuals. Thus, many CRM systems are not sufficiently utilized to maximize the return on investment.
In addition, CRM data and processes may reside in multiple datastores or systems which are not combined. This creates a barrier for a CRM user to combine all of this transactional, engagement and profile information to fully understand a customers complete relationship.